On Product Development and More...

I recently attended a webinar entitled, "Stop Playing Games! Overcoming Politics on Projects" facilitated by Rick Morris, author of Stop Playing Games! A Project Manager's Guide to Successfully Navigating Organizational Politics.

Rick asserts that "project fail because of context, not content" (a concept he learned from reading Radical Project Management, by Rob Thomsett).

I recently attended an online conference sponsored by the IT Metrics & Productivity Institute that focused on improving software development by leveraging best practices and software process improvement theory.

One of the speakers, Bob Charette, a risk management consultant, gave an excellent presentation entitled "Why do Software Projects Fail?”

I recently came across an article in Information Management magazine, entitled "Coaching for Professional Development".

It describes a management philosophy whereby, "Managers should encourage, foster and support employee's continual development as a way of helping them master changing work and keeping morale high". The ultimate goal is to keep employees motivated and productive.

A client recently asked me to provide Microsoft Project training to their organization.

Great, I thought. This is an opportunity to not only present some best practices for using Microsoft Project, but also to introduce some project management best practices into the organization.

Vince Lombardi used to begin every new season with his "Gentlemen, this is a football" speech. He talked about its size and shape, how it can be kicked, carried, or passed.

I first heard the term Death March about 10 years ago. Our principal architect (Ross, one of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with) pulled me aside and said: "Just you watch, Doug. This project will become a Death March. And, it will be your job to guard the exits - preventing us from leaving until our daily toil is done".

I remember the first time I heard this phrase - a mentor of mine at Hewlett-Packard gave me this advice many years ago. He used that along with my other favorite "Denial is not a River in Egypt".

As I previously wrote, MS Project is a really useful tool, particularly, for modeling "what if" scenarios. It's also quite useful for tracking project status.

With that being said, a common complaint that I hear (from project managers, development managers, test leads, etc.), is that the effort required to keep the model up-to-date is too high - particularly in the world of software product development - where change is the order of the day.